Atlantic Adventurer Cruise: Day 23, At Sea

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Day 23, At Sea

My biggest fear last night was that I would cough all night and not get any sleep, but my hope was I would fall right to sleep, not cough and sleep through the night.  It turned out somewhere in the middle, and I had good periods of sleep as well as bad periods of coughing.  All in all I woke up this morning feeling pretty well rested and Val slept pretty well too.

I did wake up coughing so my hope of sleeping late was dashed, but we did take it slow this morning and didn’t make it to the Neptune Lounge until 9:30 to have our morning bite.  When we got up this morning we could see land from our balcony, which was the southern coast of Italy and from the other side of the ship we could see the island of Sicily as we were sailing through the Strait of Messina.  After we passed through the Strait, we will be in the Ionian Sea and after passing through the Strait of Otranto between Italy and Greece, we will be in the Adriatic Sea.  After our breakfast, I decided to catch up on the blog while Val read about on our next port.

The morning went by quickly, but we did hear two unfortunate bits of information from the captain.  First, there have been an increasing amount of cases of the norovirus and as anyone who cruises knows, it can spread very quickly if not controlled.  It is a gastrointestinal disease and very contagious so anyone that gets it is confined to their stateroom.  The crew is extra-vigilant and spends a great deal of time sanitizing and wiping everything down.  Little things are done like removing salt and pepper shakers from the tables.  The most important thing is to constantly wash your hands thoroughly.  Hopefully this can be brought under control quickly as the ship is not under “code red” conditions yet.

The second disappointment is the weather forecast of rain tomorrow in Dubrovnik, our next port.  Val and I are both really looking forward to this port so we will be exploring it no matter what, but it would be nice to do it while keeping dry.

Neither one of us was very hungry for lunch since we ate a late breakfast, but Val wanted to go to trivia today so we went to the Lido and had a late lunch.  After lunch Val was off to our trivia and I laid down for a while for a short rest.  My cough seems a little better today, but it is still with me.  The sooner it’s gone the better as far as I’m concerned.

Val returned from trivia, but left again to attend a lecture on Greek culture.  I passed on the lecture as my cough is still bad enough that it would be annoying to the people around me.  The ship's port expert was available so I went down as I had a few questions to ask him about our visit to Drubovnik, Croatia tomorrow.  I found out the ship is running a shuttle to the Old Town so I bought tickets for that as it is too far to walk.

When Val returned from the lecture we decided to look at our pictures that we haven’t reviewed yet.  To show you how far behind we are, the pictures we viewed were from our two days in Barcelona.  We had taken a lot of pictures in Barcelona so by the time we finished it was nearly time to get ready for dinner.

Tonight is another formal night in the dining room and neither of us felt like getting dressed up.  I skipped the evening trivia again, so when Val finished she came and got me and we went up to the Lido for our dinner.  Our dining room steward, Toto, is leaving the ship tomorrow so Val stopped by the dining room to say goodbye and give him a little token of our appreciation; he was a very good waiter and also a very nice person.

After our dinner we made a trip to the casino and then called it a night.  I went to be early again and even though I am feeling much better, I am still feeling tired.  My cough seems to be fading so maybe tonight I will be able to get a good night’s sleep.  We are going to be on our own tomorrow so we don’t have to get up too early, but we don’t want to sleep in too long.

Tomorrow is the start of six straight port days with the first being Croatia and the next five being in Greece.  This will be the toughest part of our cruise schedule so hopefully I can keep up with the blog.